"bad things happen and we don’t lie about it, we don’t hide it"
May 23, 2015 9:24 AM   Subscribe

“All of those things play a part in who I am as a person. It all has equal weight. I want sexual abuse to sit happily alongside other topics like music and creativity, without this gut shudder, ‘Oh no, we can’t talk about that.’” The book is accompanied by a playlist that Rhodes put on Spotify – Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Chopin’s Etude in C Minor – a wonderfully simple, powerful idea, which at times makes it heartbreakingly difficult to read.
For The Guardian Zoe Williams interviews pianist James Rhodes about his just released autobiography, finally available after the UK Supreme Court ruled in his favour in the lawsuit taken out against him by his ex-wife. Trigger warning: child abuse.

Rhodes' ex-wife brought the case to protect her son:
Rhodes’ memoir details the very serious assaults he suffered as a young boy and the way in which music has helped him to deal with the trauma. However, his ex-wife sought to prevent publication of key passages, arguing that they would have too distressing an impact on their 12-year-old son.
Neither she nor her and Rhodes' son were named in the court case for reasons of privacy. Although rejected in the high court, this ruling was overturned by the appeals court:
The case brought by Rhodes’ ex-wife hinged on an obscure piece of Victorian case law, known as Wilkinson v Downton, in which a man who played a practical joke on an east London pub landlady in 1897 was found to be guilty of the “intentional infliction of mental distress”.

After the high court rejected his wife’s request to have key parts of the book banned, she turned to the court of appeal, which imposed a temporary injunction last October, ruling that Wilkinson v Downton was engaged and that there should be a trial to decide whether or not the boy’s rights should take priority over those of his father.
The Supreme Court in turn has now overturned this verdict, freeing Rhodes to publish his autobiography. As Rhodes speaks about in his Guardian interview as well as in an interview for Newsnight, his inability to tell his story felt very much like what his rapist -- Peter Lee, the boxing coach at his first preparatory school -- told him, that he had to shut up or bad things would happen:
His abuser’s cult of silence, which had wrecked his peace for so much of his life, had effectively been ratified in a court of law. “When did it become OK to be told, ‘You can’t talk about yourself’?” he says, baffled. “What an extraordinary violation of someone’s basic dignity. It wouldn’t be my life. It’s hard enough experiencing that as a child, it’s a totally different thing as an adult man, being told by judges: ‘You can’t say this.’ It’s very scary.”
But he also talks about understanding where his ex-wife comes from in wanting to prevent publication out of concern for their son.

The Guardian has published some fragments from Rhodes book as quoted in the Supreme Court verdict. As you might expect, this does not make for happy reading.

More on James Rhodes:

The Spotify playlist as mentioned in the first article.
James Rhodes: Piano Man (part 2): documentary about his music.
James Rhodes previously on MetaFilter, on depression.
posted by MartinWisse (26 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is harrowing stuff. Wow.

And, uh, wtf is Benedict Cumberbatch doing with this man and his wife when they leave the supreme court????
posted by nevercalm at 10:04 AM on May 23, 2015


And, uh, wtf is Benedict Cumberbatch doing with this man and his wife when they leave the supreme court????
Apparently they went to boarding school together and are friends.

It seems very strange to me to think that forcing him to keep this a shameful secret would be less likely to hurt his son than publicizing it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:11 AM on May 23, 2015 [3 favorites]


I understand his ex-wife's impulse--a world distorted enough to produce a monster who would rape a child certainly has produced people awful enough to bully a different child with what they know about the abuse of his father. I sympathize with this woman's desire to shield her child both from the blunt descriptions his father uses to describe the crimes against him, as well as from the very fact that those things happen at all in the world.

But in the end, I think she's wrong and the way to both be kind to her ex-husband about the pain he still endures and the way to be gentle to her own child is not to forbid her ex-husband from speaking about it. It's hard to present a unified front on a difficult topic with your ex-spouse and I hope for the kid's sake--and for Rhodes' sake and for his ex-wife's--they figure out how to do it. I also hope she gets guidance in how to help their son process what he may eventually learn. I think that all these things will help Rhodes continue to re-order his life to a better place.
posted by crush-onastick at 10:44 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't understand the logistics of this - how would the ex-wife know in advance, how would she be given the chance to stop it?
posted by Meatbomb at 11:02 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Really? I'm sorry, I want to tell my own story, any naysayers can fuck right off. It's MY story, not yours. As long as I am as factual about other people as I can possible be, then I just don't see where anyone has anything to say. (I will add a codicil involving classified information, but that's because I don't find becoming an unperson a doubleplusgood thing.)
posted by Samizdata at 11:24 AM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


The actual Supreme Court judgment explains a lot of the parts of this that seem strange, and is very clear about the legal issues involved. However, it quotes a fair amount from the contested passages in the memoir, for anyone who wants to avoid reading them.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:36 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


Meatbomb, given that Rhodes' ex-wife's name is never mentioned publicly (she's not named in the pleadings, nor is her country of residence and this article mentions that her name is regularly scrubbed from wikipedia), Rhodes' attorneys or the publisher's attorneys or the publisher's policies likely recommended or required that she be shown a draft before publication. This other article mentions they had an agreement upon separation to keep aspects of their lives secret from their child, who has Asperger's.
posted by crush-onastick at 11:40 AM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


Here's the text of the Appellate Court order--I have not found the British Supreme Court order yet.
posted by crush-onastick at 11:43 AM on May 23, 2015


The Supreme Court judgment is here.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:50 AM on May 23, 2015


But turns out I'm wrong--the Appellate Court ruling makes clear that an advance copy of the book was leaked to the ex-wife and she was not shown the book by Rhodes, his attorneys nor publisher.
posted by crush-onastick at 11:58 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


This seems like such a Streisand Effect situation: the book is going to receive much more attention because of being at the center of this mess than it would have if she'd just let it be. I understand why the mother would want to protect her kid, but it seems totally misguided.

I also think that inevitably her name is going to get out. She's an American who lives in the US, and this is a bizarre enough story that the US media might decide to run with it. The British courts might prohibit newspapers from naming her, but the American courts certainly won't do that. And that means that the kid is much more likely to hear about it (and his peers are much more likely to hear about it) than if she'd never tried to block publication.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:13 PM on May 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


The law really is an ass.
posted by Segundus at 12:13 PM on May 23, 2015


I do not understand the mother's impulse to stop publication of the memoir to protect the son. 12 years is old enough to know about something like this, although I understand from following some links that the son has Asperger's Syndrome. I'm sure it would be a disturbing thing to find out, but I don't see how it would actually harm him.

Making a story like this public seems incredibly important, especially if might reach someone going through the same thing.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:42 PM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]




Really? I'm sorry, I want to tell my own story, any naysayers can fuck right off. It's MY story, not yours. As long as I am as factual about other people as I can possible be, then I just don't see where anyone has anything to say.


I feel the same way. It is truth. It is reality. It happened. The end. How else do we solve problems big and small without knowing either? To want to suppress someone's deepest pain and trauma is cruel.

Life isn't made cute and simple: people want to brag and play make pretend how everything is just fine, fine, fine, and better than everyone else's, but it's not. Kids have to know. They have to know mom and dad are less than perfect and it's not because they are just being unreasonable and a drag.

They also have to learn that there are pathetic people who will say hurtful things just to make other people feel bad. It is a part of life and if everyone was as honest and courageous as James Rhodes, these bad things -- the abuse and the taunts would finally start to go away.

There is no shame in being vulnerable. There is no fault with you if someone else is a predator. People say otherwise because they are scared and believe that they give themselves a force field of protection if they blame the victim. Doesn't work.

That's why stories such as this one always need to come out: the stronger the tidal wave of reality hits, the more people have to face their only ugly fears and lies and the sooner things can change.

I am glad he is coming out to tell his story.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 1:33 PM on May 23, 2015 [10 favorites]


I better understand the mother's impulse to stop publication of the memoir to punish her ex-husband than to protect her son. It's consistent with the view of marriage and divorce I have developed over my lifetime. But I wonder if the court would have judged differently if the father had tried to prevent publication of the mother's autobiography.
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:34 PM on May 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


An amount of money went into bringing this case that I'd think a divorced mother with an Asperger's child could almost always find better uses for.

If she even had it in the first place.

The ever-ramifying British child abuse scandals are beginning to reach into the highest strata of society, and I suspect more than a few well-placed, well-heeled, and extremely nervous Britons were the real force behind this suit.
posted by jamjam at 1:35 PM on May 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


It's probably because she's the boy's mother and that's where her priorities reside, and it sounds like she's always had strong feelings about keeping things from him, either for her own reasons or the child's. We don't know, and don't need to know, what's going on there, only that she clearly felt strongly about it and people are allowed to feel what they feel.

At the same time, the fact that she/her legal team chose to frame the disclosure of the father's abuse as "willful intent" to hurt their child is mind-explodingly toxic. It's impossible to believe that it was not an attempt to control the actual fact of his abuse, to somehow create an un-abused father for her child. Which is fucking creepy.

I suspect more than a few well-placed, well-heeled, and extremely nervous Britons were the real force behind this suit

I don't doubt it, as the case built up steam, but remember that they agreed as part of their divorce not to "disclose" certain things about their pasts for the child's sake, so this is not a new attitude on her part. That's a sort of institutionalized shaming that seems to be a through-line of the relationship.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:40 PM on May 23, 2015 [10 favorites]


If the abuser had other victims (and usually they do), this may bring some healing for them. I'd think that would be reason enough to publish the memoir.
posted by tuesdayschild at 2:29 PM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


At the same time, the fact that she/her legal team chose to frame the disclosure of the father's abuse as "willful intent" to hurt their child is mind-explodingly toxic.

So from what I can read, it's "imputed intention", where even if there's no factual basis to think someone had an intent to do something, you assume that they do for legal purposes. This is a key part of the appellate court decision. The Supreme Court decision goes into mind-boggling detail about the history of this kind of legal reasoning (and words like "calculated" and "malicious"), and then ends by abolishing "imputed intention" altogether.

I am not even a lawyer let alone a barrister, but it definitely seems like this is a case where the legal meaning is very different from the everyday meaning.

It's not clear to me if that was the plan all along: whether she chose this strategy as a means to the end of censoring the book, or whether she actually believed he was willfully hurting his son.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:00 PM on May 23, 2015


  a few well-placed, well-heeled, and extremely nervous Britons were the real force behind this suit

Lemme guess: a seemingly selectively senile peer, rhymes with the British word for “wrench”?
posted by scruss at 6:53 PM on May 23, 2015


You have to talk about these things with little children so it doesn't happen to them. Using yourself as an example would help their comprehension. 12 is a bit late.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 9:22 PM on May 23, 2015


Secrets are bad for children.
posted by mumimor at 1:54 AM on May 24, 2015


I think the claim that finding out your father was abused is helpful, or at least not harmful, is ridiculous. We can argue necessary, we can argue right, but to claim it's healthy? Helpful? No. This shit seeps, it taints and haunts and crops up all over the place. It isn't just about child safety or protective behaviours, this is the kind of thing that does actually cause secondary trauma.

There's a reason my therapist fully supports my husband knowing about my assault, but strongly recommends against telling him details. This book has details, not just the kind of child appropriate approach one would take.

I don't know that I'd go the lawsuit route, and I absolutely support a survivor's right to speak. I feel for that kid though, and I think he will absolutely be harmed by the text in some way.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:19 AM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I knew about my father's abusive childhood from quite a young age. His vivid story of how his mother almost succeeded at murdering him (and the scars he still visibly carries on his eighty year old body) was shared with me at a very young age. It gave me empathy for my father and for the children I knew who were being abused; it explained why we had the family name we did (back in the seventies the familiar "familly tree" school assignments was much less forgiving of outliers like my family) and the lack of paternal relatives. I do not feel I ever suffered any trauma from knowing the truth - and my working-class family did not couch this storytelling with therapy-speak or softness.

The families I known that prize secrecy - especially my husband's "normal" family, are the truly fucked up ones where the abuse has reverberated down three or four generations from the original trauma.
posted by saucysault at 3:32 AM on May 24, 2015 [15 favorites]


This shit seeps, it taints and haunts and crops up all over the place.
It seeps and haunts and crops up whether you acknowledge it or not. Unacknowledged family trauma can be incredibly confusing, because it's hard to make sense of your parents' seemingly-irrational behavior when you have no idea what's driving it. And enforced family silences can be really toxic, making it hard for kids to acknowledge or deal with the secondary trauma that they've absorbed. And they have absorbed the trauma, even if nobody ever talks about it.

I think it would be entirely appropriate to explain to the kid that the book contains a lot of really upsetting details and that his parents don't think he should read it now. When he's a grownup, he can decide whether he wants to read it, but now he's a kid, and they hope he will trust their judgment and not seek it out. I think the family should be consulting a highly-competent and experienced mental health professional to talk about how to help this particular kid, who has high-functioning autism, process the knowledge that his father was raped as a child. (And he was going to find that out one way or another, because his father had already mentioned it in interviews.) But I don't think censoring the book would help him in any way. It's not going to protect him from the fallout of his father's trauma, and I think it would send a terrible message when he ultimately found out that his father had been forbidden by a court from sharing his experiences. Enforced silence creates stigma, and legally-enforced silence gives it the imprimatur of the state. It's not a healthy way to deal with any of this.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:17 AM on May 24, 2015 [7 favorites]


And, uh, wtf is Benedict Cumberbatch doing with this man and his wife when they leave the supreme court????

Cumberbatch is a longtime friend of Rhodes; when I saw Rhodes interviewed outside the High Court (BBC News), he thanked Cumberbatch specifically for being a huge support over the years.
posted by humph at 12:54 PM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


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